


Unconventional love

by skaralding



Series: Unconventional training [3]
Category: Naruto
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Bittersweet Ending, Canonical Character Death, Developing Relationship, F/M, Implied/Referenced Character Death, M/M, No Uchiha Massacre, Open Marriage, Pining, Third Shinobi War, Unrequited Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-02
Updated: 2019-08-02
Packaged: 2020-07-28 08:47:01
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,205
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20061247
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/skaralding/pseuds/skaralding
Summary: He and Minato only slept together twice. The amount of emotion that resulted from those brief entanglements was, in Fugaku’s opinion, entirely unwarranted.





	Unconventional love

**Author's Note:**

> Brace yourself for the wild journey where Fugaku develops (and copes with) doomed feelings. Features a bunch of stealthy (?), entirely unnecessary worldbuilding, and <s>no porn</s> only a hint of porn because I'm just that cruel. Mikoto is in this like whoa. 
> 
> The story spans from roughly 11 years before Naruto was born to around 34 years after Naruto was born, and is mostly from Fugaku's POV, with the exception of a brief epilogue from Minato's POV.

Fugaku’s first thought on seeing Minato when he sauntered into training ground thirteen, hands knitted behind his head, just two minutes before Ryuuto-sensei had demanded they show up to get acquainted with their temporary new teammates for the mission, was that, as always, Namikaze Minato made a ridiculous-looking ninja. He was so… so _sunny_. And not because of his youth, or because of his blindingly blond hair. Fugaku distinctly remembered seeing the younger boy practice his henge once, by cycling through different hair colours, his hands twisting fluidly from seal to seal in a never-ending rush.

Who had he been racing, again? Touta… Higawa Touta? Some civilian-born kid whose speciality was toward the infiltration side of things, and whose sense had been lacking enough that he’d seriously challenge Namikaze to some sort of stupid henge duel. Which he’d very naturally lost, only to erupt in quiet, but no less violent swearing, since they’d all been hunkered down in the remains of a border station on the wrong side of the Fire Country border.

(Minato had looked best, sunniest, with soft, light brown curls.)

“Alright,” Ryuuto-sensei said, from where he was pacing by the scarred, pitted target posts, “stretches, laps, then straight to sparring. Double-time the laps.” And then Fugaku was in motion, all thoughts on anything other than how well he could stretch out the muscles in his back abruptly shelved to the side.

It was probably best, he thought, midway through his second-to-last lap, that he ignore Namikaze as much as was politely possible. The boy was probably a genius, true, but civilian-born geniuses tended to flame out quickly. It was better to forge bonds with ninja he could expect to be working with five years from now.

* * *

Somehow, during the four years after that brief batch of border patrol missions he’d worked on with Minato, Fugaku never quite lost sight of the boy. Minato seemed to pop up everywhere whenever he was in the village, nodding along to Inoichi’s stories, drinking companionably with a pair of grousing Inuzuka chunin, sparring with very nearly anyone who was willing to spare the time.

At first, Fugaku felt annoyed, certain that the boy, no, the young man was somehow tailing him. But, despite the knowledge that, well, he wasn’t an atypical example of an Uchiha, and people—civilian-born ninja especially—could be quite persistent in pursuing any Uchiha that so much as nodded politely in their direction, Fugaku quickly moved past the idea that that was what Minato was doing. Half because Minato smiled for anyone and everyone, and half because whenever Fugaku turned around to see him walking into the bar or passing by a training ground, Minato only ever nodded and went right on with what he was doing.

As a strategy of pursuit, it was a piss-poor one, or it would have been for most other Uchiha, who were proud enough that they disdained anyone who wouldn’t pay them focused, exclusive attention. However, for Fugaku, it was admittedly intriguing. As the clan head’s hard-working second son, he’d never lacked attention, if not always of the kind he would have preferred. His accomplishments were measured first against those of Ichirou, his wooden-faced older brother, and then against those of any other clansmen his age, and _then_ against those of promising young out-clan ninja, and he often came out on top.

Minato, for reasons that were unclear to Fugaku, had never been included in those comparisons. Perhaps it was because his first jonin-sensei had been Jiraiya-sama. Perhaps it was because he was so much younger than Fugaku—almost a decade younger—and already so accomplished. What he lacked in kekkei genkai, he made up for with speed, conditioning and his fiendish seals; what he lacked in clan support, he made up for by drawing nearly every clan shinobi of any influence into his network, exchanging favours and jutsu and his status as a neutral, sympathetic ear for all manner of benefits.

Even Fugaku was not exempt. Whenever Minato chanced on him in one of the non-clan training grounds, he asked for a spar, and Fugaku, eager to test his increasingly strong Sharingan against the speed of Minato’s annoyingly tricky teleport technique, was always glad to oblige him.

They went, over the course of that year, from ‘Fugaku-san’, to ‘Fugaku-senpai’ to simply ‘senpai’. Minato was, of course, always ‘Minato-san’, but he never seemed to mind it.

* * *

Fugaku married unacceptably late, and only ever did so because it was required of him. It was a terrible, muddled year, tragedy following on the heels of tragedy, blow after blow leaving him and the rest of the village reeling.

First, Ichirou died. He perished in the thick of a mission, or so the thin-voiced ANBU captain that returned his corpse to the family said. Ichirou had not yet married—his one, immovable flaw, the only thing about him that Father could not boast of—and so, on top of everything else Fugaku was forced to do in his rush to take over as clan heir, he had to take that on as well.

Then a mission went unacceptably wrong, and open war was suddenly once again a possibility, which meant Fugaku was forced to rush into awkward intimacies with his barely interested, strong-willed new wife. She had been one of Ichirou’s disdained marriage candidates, and was well used to her fast-paced, well-respected life as a tokubetsu jonin specializing in genjutsu, and the fact that she had been all but ordered by the elders to give up three of her prime years in order to try for heirs enraged her.

In those trying days, the number of people Fugaku could stomach speaking honestly with that were regularly in the village could be counted on half a hand. Minato, tied to the village environs by his new, morose little genius genin, slowly became more and more of a sounding board, someone to vent to when it was three in the morning and Fugaku would rather slit his own throat than go home.

(“Compromise with her,” Minato said, one night, out of the blue. “Three years is far too long. Push for one, and a brief return to active duty afterwards, and see where that leaves things.”)

(“I hate him,” Fugaku slurred, two nights later. “He was supposed to be clan head, and I was supposed to be the one to make the next heirs. He _promised_, and then he—”)

They only slept together twice. The first time was everything to Fugaku, something he’d never even thought he’d wanted. Minato had been snickering over Fugaku’s blistering complaints about the ineptitude of his Seduction Corps sensei, and then what had started as a mockery of that useless man’s typical mannerisms had… shifted.

Fugaku had been too entranced, too eager, to really pay attention to Minato’s subtle shifts of expression, to Minato’s brief grimaces. And then, afterwards, reviewing the memory, he’d reasoned that he’d just not been as apt a partner as was possible. He’d accepted Minato’s careful, painfully polite apologies, and accepted the newly reinforced physical boundaries between them, but. He hadn’t given up. He’d set himself to wringing out every drop of knowledge he could find in the Corps, planning, scheming inwardly, practising with the somewhat suspicious Mikoto, who seemed quite glad to have a skill she could very easily lord over him.

She’d never asked who it was he was polishing up for. “As far as I’m concerned,” she said, smiling thinly, “who you fornicate with whenever you’re not here doing your duty has nothing at all to do with me.” Then added, when he frowned at her: “That is, so long as they don’t infect you with anything incurable.”

By then, they were starting to meld a little better. True, their outward harmony was based mostly on spite and a mutual desire to freeze out interference from the elders, but by the time autumn hit, it was starting to become less of a careful habit and more of the way they simply were, even in private.

Then Hatake Sakumo attempted suicide, and for a little while, all was chaos. Minato came to Fugaku’s house two nights later, red-eyed and disconcertingly furious, so much on edge that Mikoto took one look at him and went still, the way she only did before she executed a near-fatal strike.

That entire night was crystal clear, a series of strange, perfect moments.

(“I need to know that you’ll back me.”)

(“Of course.”)

The three of them spoke of many things. A surprisingly small list of co-conspirators was, if not explicitly outlined, then masterfully hinted at. Evidence passed between them, the thin amount of scrolls and photographs and scrap paper weighty in their hands. By the end of their close to treasonous discussion, Fugaku was furious too, and under that, afraid.

Afraid, because he could all too easily see how things could have taken a different turn, if Sakumo had not been found in time, if Sakumo had chosen a more lethal method, if Minato had chosen to turn in for the night instead of limping over to check on one of his many famous senpai. Shimura-san’s wasteful misuse of non-Uchiha clan ninja would only have gone on unchecked.

Shimura would have had so many paths open to him, then. He could have brought the Uchiha in on it in slow stages, blackmailing them into turning a blind eye to what was happening in exchange for his leaving their clansmen out of it. He could have used their untouched, unbothered status as a silent, secret wedge between them and the other major clans. He could have done both, and then demanded that the Uchiha surrender some of their precious youngsters to him, to show fealty. He could have ridden on the back of that insidious power-grab, and clawed and schemed his way into becoming Hokage, and where would the Uchiha be then?

Minato stayed the night, half because he was weaving on his feet by the time he stood up from the crisp seiza he had been maintaining in front of Fugaku’s low desk, and half because he and Fugaku and Mikoto were deemed close enough acquaintances that it would not be too suspicious if he chose to lean on his connection with them a little in the aftermath of Sakumo’s crisis. Mikoto guided Minato into the spare bedroom, then gave Fugaku a goading look as she retreated, one he was intimately familiar with.

Fugaku didn’t need much more than that to encourage him to step into the bedroom.

(That night was the second time.)

* * *

“We don’t have to,” Fugaku said, almost meaning it, even as his active eyes drank in the sight of Minato laid out on the futon, his hair a mess already, his gaze almost unseeing. “We don’t have to do anything.”

Minato looked at him and smiled, his expression bitter, his gaze suddenly the hottest thing in the room. Fugaku found himself leaning forward despite meaning to do the opposite. “I don’t want to think,” Minato said, his breath hot against the side of Fugaku’s face. “Please, senpai.”

_He’s trained,_ Fugaku thought, incredulously. _Surely he isn’t just… like this._

When Fugaku hesitated for the second time, Minato let out a short, breathless sound, something half a laugh and half a sneer, and he dragged Fugaku down onto him. Suddenly, Fugaku was acutely aware of the very slight difference in their strength, a difference that was quite markedly in Minato’s favour tonight.

Minato was hot and tight. There was a slight frown on his face, and he looked as if he were on the verge of tears even though his eyes were dry, and he smiled—smirked—at Fugaku’s stubbornly red gaze. Fugaku was spilling in him even before he knew his orgasm was coming, and then he was shuddering, groaning as Minato pressed a seal to the base of his cock.

“You’re not done,” Minato hissed, “until I _say_ you’re done.”

* * *

The next morning, Fugaku awoke, aching all over, his ass still obscenely sticky, to a brief, apologetic bedside note.

* * *

War came between them. Or perhaps it was everything else: the swift, merciless destruction of Shimura and his power base; the horrific scope of the struggle between the hidden villages; the continuing, crushing weight of Fugaku’s duty to the clan. Without Shimura and his cronies weighing in against the idea of the Uchiha doing more than patrol and in-country suppression, the clan went to battle en masse. Casualties were the usual sickening blow, but they gained too much from it to pull back.

Their best (worst) gain was their stumbling across the withered, yet suspiciously robust form of a man long thought dead: Uchiha Madara, or, as his dessicated ashes were interred as in an inconspicuous corner of the clan graveyard, simply ‘Madara’. The crazy old bastard had snapped up a young, hot-tempered chunin and tried to suborn said chunin to his cause after engineering the massacre of the rest of her team. Fortunately, the man had neglected to properly cremate the bodies of her team, and a team of ANBU had swooped in onto the scene when her team leader had failed to report in as planned.

The resulting five-day battle had chewed through an unpleasantly large chunk of the village’s battle-capable jonin and chunin, setting them on a back foot in the war. However, a truly heroic effort on Minato’s part equalized things well enough that the village didn’t lose too much in the treaty when it was signed a little over three months after Madara and his strange plant-producing comrade’s demise.

* * *

Another two years crawled by. Fugaku weathered the slow, gruelling process of reconstruction, bore with the strange, bewildering experience that fatherhood to a far too precocious son was turning out to be.

When the Sandaime retired, there was only one name put forward as worthy of the hat. Fugaku watched the blond, smiling, hard-eyed Hokage that he’d once known as a sunny, grinning young chunin, and he found it hard to believe he’d ever sucked that man’s cock, or ever groaned as that man did the same for him.

Not long afterwards, Orochimaru fled the village, the Yondaime’s engagement to Uzumaki Kushina was announced, and Mikoto informed him that she was once again with child. Fugaku didn’t know which of those things hit him hardest, but he kept a calm face on for each announcement, as was expected of him.

(“Nara-sama, what team formation do you think would do best at hunting him down?”)

(“Congratulations, Hokage-sama.”)

(“Mikoto, that is _wonderful_ news.”)

Mikoto was the only one to see through his mask to the emotional whirlwind beneath. She smirked at him, dragged him in across the table for a sudden, smacking kiss on the cheek, and whispered to him, quietly enough that Itachi wouldn’t hear it, that he was now free to go sow his wild oats wherever he pleased.

She was also the only one to see him after he went on a bender during that week’s usual biweekly bar crawl—an event that always seemed to draw in at least a quarter of whichever jonin were currently in-village, due to the Yondaime’s unabashed and very nearly regular participation in it.

(“He didn’t—he said, when I asked, that he’s _never_, he _never_ felt—”)

Mikoto was careful, after that, to make sure he always knew whenever Kushina-san and her other friends were planning to visit. It still meant that he saw the woman much more than he would have liked.

* * *

Two years later, Orochimaru died under a merciless, unending hail of jutsu from the joint cooperation of the Konoha-Ame-Suna-Kusa alliance. Dismantling his hidden bases, deprogramming or disposing of his operatives, and arguing over the disposition of countless stacks of stolen information took the better part of six months. In Fugaku’s private opinion, the Diplomatic Corps’ newly battle-tested ability to smile in the face of spurious demands and thank undeserving people for their useless contributions without slighting them was the only reason the Kage summit the following year didn’t descend into anarchy or trigger another world shinobi war.

To his knowledge, though Jiraiya-sama faithfully continued on in his capacity as Konoha’s spymaster, his bond with the Yondaime never fully recovered. Tsunade-sama simply went on expanding her burgeoning new hospital in Wave Country, and politely ignoring any request from Konoha that was more involved than ‘please train this new batch of medics’.

(“It was worth it,” Minato slurred, on one of the nights when he wouldn’t accept Fugaku’s polite declination to drink with him for what it was. “It _was_ worth it…?”

“Yes.”)

* * *

Years later, Minato grinned in his direction just after he’d signed the Universal Treaty, and for a moment, Fugaku was twenty-six again, dazed, burned by the reckless brightness that was too close, too _much_.

That night, as the jittery discussions and tense whispers died down, and people drifted off into rooms in unusual, quietly unremarked pairs and groups, Fugaku lingered near, but not too near the doorway of the Hokage’s room, hoping. Certain, and yet uncertain, that perhaps, just for tonight…

But, when Minato stalked by, shadowed by his somewhat more absent-minded than usual ANBU guard, he only paused to clap Fugaku on the shoulder lightly, the way he had done to Inoichi and Chouza and the others just moments ago. Like they had only ever been friends.

(“You’ve more than earned a good night’s rest, Fugaku. Sleep well.”)

* * *

Fugaku stopped going to the bar crawls after that. When asked why, he passed it off as having got a little too old for that sort of thing. Too responsible, too aware of the two children he had at home, one bratty and one wise beyond his meagre years. It was important that they could always count on being able to see their father every other evening, instead of just whenever he went off shift from the station, or whenever he wasn’t on call with Diplomacy.

Whenever he reeled off that excuse, Mikoto always found occasion to drift close afterwards, to give his hand a hard, commiserating squeeze. These days, Fugaku never bothered trying to conceal the small smile that he reserved for just her, and she always responded with a bashful lowering of her eyes, playing right alongside with him.

“You _could_ try finding someone else, you know,” she said, every so often, but because she knew he never would, she was careful to reserve one night for him every other week. When he teased her about her excessive generosity, she retorted by saying that every successful charade was built on a grain of truth. “And there is the fact that, by now, you’re very well trained to do everything I like.”

So Fugaku rolled his eyes and redoubled his efforts, and felt both humbled and surprised when one night every other week gradually turned into one night a week, on pain of death and dismemberment if he should be so churlish as to miss it.

(“To think that I’m truly going to grow old with you,” Mikoto said, one night, her head heavy on his chest. “Ludicrous, isn’t it?” But she smiled as she said so, the barely-there lift to her lips that he liked to think was just for him.)

* * *

Years later, when Itachi had long reached Fugaku’s height, and his trim, calmly smiling Seduction Corps sensei (someone Mikoto had politicked viciously to get, heedless of the grudges she left in her wake) presented the main branch of the Uchiha the honour of training the Hokage’s bombastic only son, Fugaku could almost pretend it didn’t hurt. The privilege was presented to him first, by right, even though he was fairly sure he’d never actually tested properly for his third year of Corps training, and he’d certainly never been saddled with actual seduction-focused missions.

It hurt enough that he tuned out the rest of the ceremony, the polite, measured acceptance from a curiously unwilling Itachi, the traditional admonishments from Shima-san. But Fugaku by then was well versed in dealing with that insidious hurt, so he smiled and sent off Shima-san with his son, and went back to the clan paperwork he’d been in the middle of, and it wasn’t until that night, when he was safe in Mikoto’s arms, that he allowed himself to weep.

(“It’s stupid that it still hurts,” he groused. “It’s ridiculous.”

“It’s our curse,” Mikoto murmured. “It’s in our blood.”)

(They neither of them mentioned her own, long absent third, the hard-faced Hyuuga Hizashi, a man Fugaku could barely believe even Mikoto had been able to seduce until he came home too early one night and caught them kissing.)

* * *

Fugaku didn’t ask why Mikoto never again got close to a Hyuuga, just the way she didn’t ask why his few, brief entanglements were never blonds. They were the same in this one thing; they knew an attempt at substitution would not satisfy them.

* * *

“Always thought… you’d suit,” Aunt Hotaru, the woman who had been a meddling substitute mother to most of the clan for years, whispered. Her black-and-grey eyelashes fluttered, and her press of his and Mikoto’s hands was light enough that it may as well not have happened at all. “You… happy?”

“Yes,” Fugaku said, emphatically, and felt a little shocked to realize he meant it. “Very much so, obachan.” They weren’t going to be happy in a few moments—he could see the life draining out of his aunt, and he could feel Mikoto’s angry tears peppering his sleeve. Uchiha Hotaru was the only elder Mikoto ever truly smiled for, the only one whose opinion they didn’t have to dissect for hidden meanings and unfriendly traps. But even with the grief and dread hanging over him, Fugaku could see a time when it wouldn’t, could imagine it with startling clarity.

It would look very much like this: Mikoto by his side, her slightly rounded, familiar frame leaning just a little against him, or his hand around her waist when it was his turn to crave support, to ask for it.

“Mi… Mi-chan too…?”

Mikoto let out an ugly, watery chuckle. “I’m not happy _now_,” she said, and Aunt Hotaru’s mouth stretched into a sly, faltering smile, and she once again pressed Mikoto’s shaking hand.

* * *

“Bury me in the same plot,” Fugaku muttered, struggling against the congestion in his lungs, fighting to enunciate properly. Then, when Itachi nodded, his face tight with unhappiness, Fugaku could not resist saying, his tone as serious as he could make it: “It’ll save on expenses.”

Then added, for good measure, as Itachi and Sakura-chan and Sasuke glared down at him, and Yuri narrowed her eyes at him: “The Yondaime… don’t invite him.”

He couldn’t help but feel a little disappointed that Itachi was, as always, the only one that didn’t look completely thrown by that request. For revenge, Fugaku reached out and took hold of his eldest son’s hand and said, in a sighing, tremulous tone: “T-take… take good care of your otouto.”

_Ah,_ he thought, seeing Sasuke’s eyes widen, and Itachi’s sudden, marked stillness, and his boys’ wives’ careful non-reaction, _how Mikoto would have laughed._

* * *

### Epilogue

Uchiha Fugaku was never Minato’s best friend. He wasn’t important in any earth-shattering way, just another lethal, loyal pawn, another node in the wide net of Minato’s carefully constructed social circle.

He was also an amusing drunk. Surprisingly, because at the time Minato discovered it, in his experience, drunken Uchiha tended to come in one of two different moulds: quiet, morose and surly, or quiet, morose and silently weepy.

_Perhaps,_ he remembered thinking, smiling inwardly, _it’s just I wasn’t close enough with one of them before, to be trusted with their true face._ Because, while Fugaku had _appeared_ to be the first type of Uchiha drunk as Minato helped him out of the bar, the moment they’d repaired to the roof of the ruin behind training ground twenty-five, Fugaku had… well. Unbent.

Fugaku had had a rusty, almost ugly sort of laugh, when he wasn’t trying to be polite. He had been unbelievably smug when he beat Minato in an impromptu game of ‘spell with senbon’, a.k.a. the game idiotic new jonin played in seedy bars in a bid to lure in civilian girls that didn’t know (or were pretending not to know) how very low the skill bar was for using the game to make yourself look good. In fact, though Fugaku had been nine years older than Minato, and just as seasoned a jonin as you could want for his age, nearly all his behaviour that night would have made perfect sense coming from Yuuhi Kenjirou (genjutsu type, prone to giving his intended conquests fake, dripping flowers) or from Akimichi Ran (taijutsu type, handsome and so disgustingly aware of it that it was a well-worn joke amongst his former teammates).

Then Minato had run out of motivation to keep up with the rematch, and the gap between Fugaku’s eerily silent throws had grown larger and larger, and then Fugaku had asked, in a low, curious tone, his words slightly slurred: “Did you ever know my brother?”

“No,” Minato had murmured, racking his brains. He’d made it his business to know (or know of) everyone, but it was tough getting that done during wartime, or during the lead up to it. “Not sure I ever even met him.” And then, when he’d remembered the event that had made possible the mutual shirking they were currently getting up to, he’d said: “ANBU?”

“Yes.” Curiously, that word had been crisp. Almost light. “The bastard.”

Minato had already been able to hear the tremble in the other man’s voice; there’d been no reason to turn to look at him then. But Minato’s unfailing flaw was that he was always too curious for his own good, and so he had seen, as if in a trance, the one unfairly perfect tear rolling down Fugaku’s left cheek. It had been followed by another, and another, and that had jolted Minato into turning away.

“I hate him,” Fugaku slurred. He’d sounded as if he were smiling a little, and Minato, still reeling from the sight of the other man’s tears, had been unable to bear the thought of turning to look. “He was s’posed to be clan head, and I… was s’posed to be the one to make the next heirs.” Fugaku shifted then, his hands gritting into the stone of the wall they were both perched on. “He _promised_…”

Minato had never liked watching someone twist helplessly in the grasp of their own misery. He’d still hesitated, unsure of whether a touch would be welcome, before reaching out to drape an arm over the other man’s shoulders. “It’s alright,” was the only thing he could say. “It’ll be alright.”

Now, looking at the extravagant rectangle set deep within the Uchiha clan graveyard, Minato couldn’t help but feel as if he’d been paying for that one hug for… what was it now, forty years? Back then, he’d had a theory, something about his dull, soothing chakra signature giving him an unwanted edge in starting or deepening relationships. His first Seduction Corps sensei had either truly bought into it or had enjoyed humouring him; his second, and final sensei had mercilessly cut the legs out from under him.

_“What you are,”_ Toga-sensei had said, their tone even more genderless than usual, _“is **safe**.”_

Minato had hated to hear that, even as something deep down in him agreed. Calming people, soothing them, had only come easily to him in the Academy because he’d had years of practice from the orphanage, and because he’d instinctively understood that he, clanless, motherless and fatherless, could only smile and nod and pray that he could talk his way around the dislike of anyone important. Being safe, being comfortable to hang around, being someone people relaxed with, all of that had served him so well that it was sometimes—with certain people—an effort to be anything else.

(Kushina genuinely enjoyed it when he snapped at her. That, more than anything, was what set him on her trail, eager to find out if they could make something of their perpetual back-and-forth.)

Minato had assumed, when it became clear to him that Fugaku had developed a leaning for him, that firmer boundaries and continued careful, respectful handling of their relationship would smooth things over eventually. He’d never known how to feel about the fact that he’d been so utterly wrong.

He wished, sometimes, that he hadn’t been so reckless, so weak and unwise as to surrender to his bad judgement not once, but two times. The first time, in particular. It had _hurt_, and had been more awkward than pleasurable, contrary to what Fugaku’s heated, yet playful gaze had initially promised. And without that first time, there likely wouldn’t have been a second, wouldn’t have been any kind of stupid thoughts about how the last time hadn’t ruined things between them, and so another go at it probably wouldn’t.

After that, Minato had sworn off of mixing sex with friendship, and had been surprised how much less stress he felt as a result. The village had made a sickeningly sweet romantic tale out of his devotion to Kushina, and he’d been forced to deal with a new, particularly irritating type of flirt: the kind of person who wanted a challenge. But he’d still felt so much less weighed down that he’d gone on the same way, glad to ignore constant, fluctuating expectations and to shed the ever-present worry that he’d particularly slighted someone by cosying up to them or turning them down.

He wondered what it said about him that these trivial thoughts were the sort of thing on his mind as he stared down at the week-old gravestone of a friend. Smiling, he imagined the look Fugaku would have given him if he’d said any or all of it out loud. Then, his smile dimming, he imagined the way Mikoto would have narrowed her eyes at him, and then stepped in dramatically close to her husband, her hand clutching at Fugaku’s sleeve coquettishly.

_“This one is **taken**, Namikaze,”_ she’d joked, once. _“Even if you had the liver to play around, he would still be off limits to the likes of you.”_

She’d never competed with Minato over anyone, not even when they were Corps apprentices suffering through an increasingly hands-on final year together. He was all but certain that if she _had_ tried to compete with him in that way, she would have won.

“My friends,” Minato murmured, stooping carefully, materializing the proper flowers with an absent-minded touch to one wrist. “Oh, how I miss you.”

After arranging his bouquet to the right of the other offerings, Minato lingered before the gravestone for hours, even though he could feel his legs stiffening. He didn’t move to do anything more than stretch in place until Kushina, who’d shown up something like an hour and a half into his impromptu vigil, put her hand about his wrist and slowly but surely towed him away. “We’ll all meet again in the Pure Lands,” she muttered to him, fiercely, “but we will _not_ do so this afternoon, and certainly not tonight.”

**Author's Note:**

> If you've read _Unconventional instructor_, you'll know what I mean when I say I can't help but weep for poor Ueno-san, who was so very much off Fugaku's radar that his name never came up even once ヽ(*。>Д<)o゜
> 
> Seriously, though, I'd love to know what you think of this. I hope it made you hurt in a very pleasant way. Do note that this is probably not the end of the series, even though the story skipped way past the other two chronologically.


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